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What is the Future of Blogging?

A little over five years ago, sites like Typepad, Blogger and WordPress dazzled by empowering anyone to instantaneously share his or her thoughts with the world; My how times change. Today, however, in a world where thousands of status updates and tweets whiz by our screens every hour, blogging arguably feels slow.

So is blogging dead? It depends on who you ask. After all, Rappsody Studios and WebBiz 411 are blogs and they’re doing quite well. However, it’s definitely time for a closer examination of the blog – where it sits today and where it’s going.

From my point of view, blogging’s future will likely flow down one of two paths: either it will evolve and grow into something else (like many species have) or it will succumb to Darwinism and become extinct (like the Dodo). Let’s take a closer look at each. We’ll also give you the chance to add your own opinion to our mind map.

Evolution

If blogging is to evolve, there are a number of potential outcomes. One possibility is that blogs remain the primary social hub for many of us on the web but turn into lifestream sites that syndicate our content to and/or aggregate it from anywhere.

Another possibility is that blogs become social networks of their own. Each of the major weblog platforms has such a mechanism in place (e.g. TypePad Connect, Blogger Followers). However, they are disconnected from each other.

Finally, we have Facebook and others aiming to become connective tissue between many sites. This could help evolve the blog format more quickly. Of course there’s grey here and all of the above could converge.

Darwinism

The flip side of the coin is that Darwinism takes over and blogging is unable to grow into something new because it’s too late and our attention is scattered.

Journalism has become a lot more bloggy over the last five years. It’s already impossible to tell the elephants (journalists) apart from bloggers (zebras) because, well, they mated into Zebrelephants. Meanwhile I suspect many personal blogs are withering too.

What’s more, there’s no doubt that the microblogs and social networks are stealing time away from blogs. Given our finite window of attention this may continue and threaten many existing bloggers.